How to respond to a YouTube cat-astrophe?  Decentralize the web!
#published 2012-10-18 16:46
#author Christopher Allan Webber

<p class="centered">
  <a href="/pages/campaign.html">
    <img src="/blog_images/think_of_the_kittens.png"
         alt="Cats, and a sad internet" />
  </a>
</p>

<p>
  In the video we made for the
  <a href="/pages/campaign.html">MediaGoblin campaign</a>, there's a
  part of the video which says: "What would happen if YouTube went
  away?  What would happen to cat videos on the internet?  It would be
  like a cat massacre."  People seem to really respond to this part of
  the video, which is good (though they usually ask me how we resisted
  the pun "cat-astrophe"... I guess with the title of this blogpost,
  we finally gave in).  And every now and then we get a reminder that
  this isn't just a vague possibility: these things can... and
  do... really happen.
</p>

<p>
  Today, for a few minutes, <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/18/youtube-goes-down-adding-to-googles-no-good-rotten-very-bad-day/">YouTube
  went down</a>.  For a brief moment in time, millions of cat
  voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.  Now,
  granted, they came back a few minutes later.  But within the same
  short interval that I heard about YouTube going down, various
  programmer friends of mine started complaining that they couldn't
  get any work done because
  <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/18/github-goes-down-with-major-disruption/">GitHub also went down due to a DDOS attack</a>.
</p>

<p>
  Is this because YouTube or GitHub are badly run, or that the
  companies that run them are inherently evil?  No, I don't think so.
  But there <i>is</i> a structural problem, one that's the case with
  any major centralized service: when that service goes out, it takes
  everything it hosts out with it.  This is a reminder that these
  types of institutions, even when run by brilliant and wonderful
  people, have inherent flaws as they become large, centralized
  behemoths.  Even the nicest, most well run of centralized behemoths
  can fall.  And will.
</p>

<p>
  And as we point out on the <a href="/pages/campaign.html">campaign
  page</a>, it's entirely possible that your favorite large,
  centralized service could go away permanently.  In fact, some day it
  probably will.  Geocities might have seemed like a joke to everyone
  by the time it disappeared, but in 2000 it seemed like a huge
  institution that would never go away...
  <a href="http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=GeoCities">but then
  it did</a>.  Maybe some day YouTube or Flickr will cease to be
  profitable, and then those will go away.  It could happen... it
  <a href="http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Video">nearly
  happened to Google Video</a>.
</a>

<p>
  What's the cure?  Bring the web back to be a decentralized place,
  the way it was intended to be.  This isn't an easy task, though:
  services are getting larger and more complicated, and need a lot of
  special expertise to get them working properly.  The good news: we
  are already working toward that future.  Could you
  <a href="/pages/campaign.html">help us out</a>?
</p>

<p class="centered">
  <a href="/pages/campaign.html">
    <img src="/blog_images/support_mediagoblin-blagpost.png"
         alt="Gavroche imploring you to support mediagoblin!" />
  </a>
</p>

<p>Thanks for all you do,<br />
  &nbsp;&nbsp;-- The MediaGoblin team
</p>
  
